Ousted Ind. school chief new Florida commissioner

Source: Houston Chronicle

Indiana's recently ousted state school superintendent was named to a new job Wednesday as Florida's education commissioner, a choice that drew applause from Gov. Rick Scott and criticism from the leader of Florida's statewide teachers union.

The State Board of Education unanimously selected Tony Bennett, a Republican who lost a bid for re-election in Indiana last month, from a slate of three finalists at its regular meeting in Tampa.

The commissioner is hired by the board, whose members are appointees of Scott and prior GOP governors. After Scott was elected governor in 2010, he pressured Eric Smith, who had strong support in the Republican-controlled Legislature, to resign as commissioner. Scott was a proponent of Smith's successor, Gerard Robinson, who resigned in August after about a year on the job.

In Indiana, Bennett led efforts to adopt accountability changes, including letter grades for schools, pioneered by Florida and former Gov. Jeb Bush, who has close ties to several board members.

This week, Jeb headed to Indianapolis, where he spoke to state leaders about school grading, charter schools, third-grade promotion requirements and several other things he brought to Florida's public schools.

They ate it up.

The Indianapolis Star reports that Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels "would like to adopt everything Bush described — and more." State superintendent of public instruction Tony Bennett was equally enthusiastic, the Louisville Courier-Journal reports.

"There is nothing off the table in the areas of freedom, competition and accountability," Bennett told the Courier-Journal.

2. When corporatists

mouth the code words "competition and accountability" what they mean is competition on their terms for us and accountability on those terms, using their rules, which are designed for us to lose and for them to win. More educators are coming to realize this as the corporate agenda becomes less and less deniable. That agenda, of course, is the privatization, or at least the profitazation, of public education using public money. It always has been. It doesn't have a thing to do with educating kids unless the goal is making them obedient serfs and mindless consumers.

3. Watch out, Florida

Read up on his disastrous tenure in Indiana. Learn how he managed to lose a statewide race to a school librarian and political novice, whom he outspent by about 10-1 thanks to out-of-state donors, by more votes than Senate candidate Richard "God intended rape babies" Mourdock, in a red state, in a year where the Republicans won the governor race and "supermajorities" in both houses of the state legislature, all because he pissed off teachers so badly that even voters who would typically vote for a potted plant if an "R" were next to its name eschewed the straight ticket to vote for Glenda Ritz instead.

It's a bit like fumigating an apartment - the cockroaches will flee to other apartments. They all need to be cleaned of these vermin; meanwhile, I'm sorry, Florida, that our problem became yours!